The Political Vision of The Lord of the Rings

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Jul 18

Tolkien’s timeless epic, The Lord of the Rings, is one of the bestselling books of all time and Peter Jackson’s three-part film adaptation of Tolkien’s classic is one of the highest grossing movies of all time. On June 8 this year, Jackson’s blockbuster returned to movie theatres across the country. What is it about Tolkien’s work which is proving so enduringly popular?

The secret of Tolkien’s success is to be found in the theological and philosophical depths from which he drew his inspiration. He described The Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”, illustrating that its deepest meaning is to be found in a Christian understanding of the cosmos. Since this is so, we need to see the political vision of the work as being rooted in philosophical first principles. It does not subsist within the sphere of ideology; it is not simply sociopolitical or sociocultural. On the contrary, Tolkien’s vision of communitas in Middle-earth is that of a Christian responding to the ills of society in accordance with theological and philosophical first principles.

Tolkien’s anthropology goes beyond the materialistic understanding of humanity. Man is not merely homo sapiens (“wise” man), he is homo viator (man on a journey). But his journey is not a mere meaningless ramble; it is a quest and ultimately a pilgrimage. His life, therefore, has purpose. Furthermore, however, and crucially, he has free will. He can choose or refuse to take the appointed journey. He can refuse the quest. He is able to obey or disobey the purpose for which he was created. The one who refuses to be the homo viator he is meant to be and chooses to go his own way, or perhaps chooses to go nowhere in particular, like John Lennon’s “Nowhere Man”, has opted to be homo superbus (proud man), instead of homo viator. The drama of human life, which plays itself out in The Lord of the Rings as in much other great literature, is the battle between homo viator and homo superbus; it is a perennial civil war in the heart of every human person and, therefore, in the heart of every human society. It is the battle between good and evil.

Tolkien sums up the significance of free will by stating, in his famous essay “On Fairy Stories”, that “the Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation”. Those things that are prohibited ethically because they are evil are behind a locked door. Free will is the key that enables us to unlock the door and unleash the evil that lurks within. In political terms, the locked door shows the necessity of resisting temptation, the necessity of self-sacrifice, or what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called self-limitation. Since our freedom is the key to the locked door, the door will only remain locked if we choose not to use the forbidden key that is entrusted to us. The temptation is rooted in the fact that we have the freedom to break the rules but the duty to refrain from doing so. This temptation is present in The Lord of the Rings in the power of the Ring. The wearing of the Ring is the unlocking of the door. It unleashes the power of the Dark Lord. Bearing the Ring, without wearing it, is resisting the temptation to succumb to the Dark Lord’s power.

The applicability of this principle to the sphere of the sociopolitical is obvious and is perhaps best expressed in two apparently different but paradoxically convergent political maxims. The first is Lord Acton’s so-called liberal maxim that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely”. The second is Edmund Burke’s so-called conservative maxim that “liberty itself must be limited in order to be possessed”. Put bluntly in the modern vernacular, Lord Acton’s maxim could be translated as “power corrupts and big power corrupts big time”. No wonder the economist E. F. Schumacher declared that “small is beautiful”! No wonder that Tolkien sympathizes with the beautiful smallness of the hobbits and chooses them as the agents of virtue against the political might of Mordor’s evil empire.

Burke’s maxim could be restated bluntly as a warning that unrestrained liberty, otherwise known as anarchy in political terms, or libertinism in moral terms, would not result in widespread freedom but in the rule of the most ruthless and the enslavement of everyone else. Imagine a world in which rapists, murderers and thieves were at liberty to do as they please. No wonder that Solzhenitsyn insists that self-limitation is the key to a free and healthy society. No wonder that Oscar Wilde could describe anarchy as “freedom’s own Judas”. It is the curse that betrays liberty with a kiss.

Tolkien encapsulates this whole understanding of the relationship between freedom and responsibility with succinct brilliance, in a letter to his son: “The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called “self-realization” (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.”

This discussion of freedom raises the question of Christianity and the role of religion in promoting the necessary self-limitation which individuals and communities need to attain the best society possible in a fallen world. Tolkien perceived, as all Christians must, that politics and economics are merely derivatives of theology and philosophy. Change the philosophy and you change the politics. If the prevailing philosophy has God as its first cause and centre, His commandments will be obeyed and the locked door will remain secure. A belief in God demands self-limitation. Remove God and the commandments will be ignored and ridiculed. The locked door will be opened and, like a Pandora’s box, its woes will be released on a heedless and hedonistic humanity. No God means “no limits”, and no limits leads to the anarchy, which in turn leads to the rule of the most ruthless: the political rapists, thieves and murderers known as dictators. This is the great ironic paradox. If we won’t limit ourselves through the voluntary practice of virtue, order can only be restored through the imposition of strict laws which impose limits on the individual. When anarchy enables thugs to run free, those living in fear will want the biggest thug to protect them from the other thugs. Once again, Tolkien encapsulates this ironic paradox with brilliant succinctness: “[H]umility and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power – and then we get and are getting slavery.”

Tolkien lived in an age when Orcs, such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao wielded rings of power in the name of “freedom” and “equality”, bringing not merely slavery but the slaughter of tens of millions of people in the bloodiest orgy of power-wielding in human history. In our own time, we might see “universal greatness and pride” manifesting itself in globalism and the desire of the global elites to wield the one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

The political vision of Tolkien, which enabled him to understand the world in which he found himself, also enabled him to create a secondary world which holds up a mirror to our own world, showing our world to us in a new and illuminating way. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien asks, and answers, fundamental questions about the individual and his relationship with the community of neighbours he is commanded to love. Throughout the epic, the perennial tension between the selflessness and the selfishness in human nature (homo viator versus homo superbus) is felt palpably on almost every page. It is ever present. Tolkien illustrates, as only a master storyteller can, that only if selflessness, born of humility, prevails can the individual and the community prosper, and not only prosper but, ultimately, survive. In practical terms this means that self-sacrifice, that is to say, heroism – heroic virtue – otherwise known as holiness, is absolutely necessary. It is the only antidote to the poison of spiritual obesity, that is to say, hedonism. Heroism or hedonism, that is the question. To be or not to be. To be as we were meant to be, or not to be as we were meant to be. That is the question.